Intel's Lydonville could put SSDs into corporate-land

Intel’s SSD 710 series, code-named Lydonville, could be just what is needed to kick start solid state disks (SSDs) into the lucrative corporate market.

Although SSDs make sense in servers there have been a few problems which have put the brakes on widescale adoption.

Although cost is a factor, SSDs are rumoured not to last as long as traditional hard-drives, which makes them a hard sell for storage companies.

However Intel says that Lydnonville will have a mean time between failure (MTBF) measured into the millions of hours, effectively matching traditional hard-drives.

According to Andy Cordial, managing director of the secure storage systems specialist Origin Storage that is just what will tip the balance towards SSDs in the corporate domain.

In an interview with the DataCentre Journal, which is about storage so we read it when we have run out of melatonin, Cordial praised Chipzilla’s new SSD format.

He said that with data transfer read rates of 270 Mbps and write speeds of 210 Mbps, together with an MTBF of two million hours, this starts to give the SSD drives the kind of characteristics that IT managers want.

What is even better, is the news that Intel’s more advanced SSD 720 series, or Ramsdale will support the PCI Express interface. This is important because it supports a higher bus throughput with a smaller physical footprint, plus the advantage of a more detailed error detection system, Cordial said.

Intel’s SSD 720’s specifications look very promising, especially if the rumours of read/write speeds of 2200 and 1800 Mpbs, respectively, are supported in the real world, he said.

It looks like Intel is gaining a few converts in its cunning plan to rule the SSD world.